Kenkyusha's Lighthouse Japanese-English Dictionary (1990)

Bran

Details

Title: ライトハウス和英辞典・Kenkyusha's Lighthouse Japanese-English Dictionary
Volumes: 1
Language: Japanese / English
Publisher: 研究者
Year: 1990
Pages: 1,808

I have the second edition of this dictionary. This is a pretty straight-forward Japanese-to-English dictionary with approximately 40,000 entries. Its intended audience is native Japanese speakers, but it offers a number of benefits to someone learning Japanese. Like many Kenkyusha dictionaries, it has copious example sentences with each word, providing collocations and idiomatic usage. These sentences are the dictionary's real strength, and they help a learner of either language learn vocabulary in context.

The front inner flap of the dictionary provides place names, while the back inner flap provides a list of famous people. There is a guide on usage and symbols at the beginning of the dictionary, and a one-page pronunciation guide at the end. Peppered throughout are a series of info boxes, providing the learner of English with guidance on specific topics, such as "greetings," "sports," or "restaurants." There are a few black-and-white photographs and labelled diagrams scattered throughout, but this monochromatic dictionary is mostly text.

Sample Entries

In order to allow easy comparison between the different reference works on this site, I use the same entries, where available: "umbrella" and "Saint Louis." I picked these because they generally provide shorter examples, but also because I knew that "umbrella" would likely be found in all of the dictionaries and "Saint Louis" would likely be found in all of the encyclopedias. This dictionary does not generally have place names or other proper nouns featured as entries, though Saint Louis does appear in a special chart on page 41 which lists all of the state names as well as the names of major cities in both English and katakana, next to a map of the United States on the following page. "Umbrella" has a pretty normal-sized entry for this dictionary, found on page 281.

かさ1　傘 umbrélla 🄲; (日傘) súnshàde 🄲, párasòl 🄲 ★ 前者のほうがより一般的。

¶　私は*傘をたたんだ　I ｢closed [folded] my umbrella. // *傘をさしなさい　Put up [Open] your umbrella. // 彼はきれいに巻いてあった*傘をほどいてさした　He undid his neatly rolled umbrella and put it up. // 雨が降りそうだから*傘を持って行きなさい　Take an umbrella with you. It looks like rain. // *傘に入れて下さいませんか（⇒あなたの傘を共同で使ってよろしいですか）May I share your umbrella? // 私の*傘に入りませんか　Won't you get under my umbrella? // *傘が風でおちょこになった　The wind turned my umbrella inside out. // 彼女は私に*傘をさしてくれた　She held the umbrella over me. // 他国の核の*傘の下にいて、果たして安全だろうか　Are we really safe under the nuclear umbrella of a foreign nation?

傘立て umbrella stand 🄲　傘の柄［骨］umbrella ｢handle [rib] 🄲.

The 🄲 marks countable nouns (it is common to say things like "three umbrellas"). The star (★) marks a cautionary usage note - in this case, it tells the user that the former word (umbrella) is more common than the given alternates.